As you know with the latest/greatest/amazing OS2 update we can now connect korg nano/micro controllers directly to the Pa4x without using an adapter. This is a huge plus for live performance... According to the manual (also applicable to older models) we can use a DAW or Master Keyboard to "remotely" control certain features of the keyboard such as 'Selecting Styles, Sounds, Keyboard Sets and even SongBook entries! There's a list of midi commands available for each individual entry in the manual, so when I saw the official video I couldn't connect the nanoPad2 to the keyboard fast enough! In theory, we should be able to assign all these trigger pads to these commands and be able to instantly select our go to Styles, sounds.... . The pads are nice and big and the whole thing is smaller than a computer keyboard. Trust me, you WILL fall in love with it! Here's a pic of how it looks:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXRVUfMDWYc ... rkeyboards
It has 16 trigger pads and there's 4 scenes/pages...so you can potentially program up to 64 entries with an extremely easy to use Editor. On top of that you can save your programming and use different assignments for different gigs. Like you can have a special assignment for the Church, Wedding, Club.... . There's a lot more to this but you get the idea.
To make this connection work, you just make a small change to one of the Global Midi-In Channels on the Pa4x and that's it. First I experimented with doing something basic like triggering Start/Stop/Intros and Vars and it worked beautifully.
https://youtu.be/pz8LLCkdAyg
Though unless the keyboard is broken, nobody would want to just use the nanoPAD2 to trigger an Intro/Var/Fill because these Style Elements already have a dedicated button on the panel, right? so then I tried really hard to get it to control some useful features such as selecting Styles and such but it just didn't want to work. Like I would program the pads to select styles using the commands published in the manual, but the Pa4x just wouldn't respond at all.
To my surprise the final official answer from the tech support was that you can NOT program an individual Pad (on the nanoPAD2) to transmit CC00, CC32 and Program Change messages!!! So in order for me to use the nanoPAD2 to do something as simple as selecting a Sound, Style or a Keyboard Set......I would need to assign Pad#1 to CC00 , Pad#2 to CC32 and Pad#3 to program change. In other words:
1) You gotta waste at least 3 trigger pads to transmit a simple string of midi commands
2) You have to remember which 3 pad combination do what exactly...
3) You have to press 3 trigger pads to Select a Style (for example).
This is not reasonable. This is not practical....In fact this is the worst idea ever! It gets even worse. Apparently with the original nanoPAD you could assign all these commands to a single pad, but NOT with the nanoPAD2. Very very very strange indeed!
This whole idea had a great potential for sure.
